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Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship:Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the GlobalSouth
Farhana Sultana
To cite this article: Farhana Sultana (2020): Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship:Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the Global South, Annals of the American Association ofGeographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1715193
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1715193
Published online: 27 Feb 2020.
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Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship:Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the
Global South
Farhana Sultana
Department of Geography, Syracuse University
Scholars have demonstrated that citizenship is tied to water provision in megacities of the Global South
where water crises are extensive and the urban poor often do not have access to public water supplies.
Drawing from critical feminist scholarship, this article argues for the importance of analyzing the
connections between embodied intersectionalities of sociospatial differences (in this instance, gender, class,
and migrant status) and materialities (of water and water infrastructure) and their relational effects on urban
citizenship. Empirical research from the largest informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as
surrounding affluent neighborhoods, demonstrates that differences in water insecurity and precarity not only
reinforce heightened senses of exclusion among the urban poor but affect their lived citizenship practices,
community mobilizations, and intersectional claims-making to urban citizenship, recognition, and belonging
through water. Spatial and temporal dimensions of materialities of water and infrastructure intersect with
embodiments of gender, class, and migrant status unevenly in the urban waterscape to create differentiated
urban citizens in spaces of abjection and dispossession. The article argues that an everyday embodied
perspective on intersectionalities of urban citizenship enriches the scholarship on the water–citizenship
nexus. Key Words: citizenship, embodied, infrastructure, intersectionality, urban, water.
学者们的研究已经证明, 在南半球的大城市中, 公民身份与供水状况息息相关。这些城市中普遍存在
水危机, 城市中的穷人往往无法获得公共供水。本文借鉴了批判女权主义的观点, 论证分析以下主题的重要性:社会空间差异所体现的交集性(在本研究案例中为性别、阶级和移民身份差异)与物质
性(即水和水基础设施) 之间的联系, 以及它们对城市公民身份的相关影响。本文对孟加拉国达卡最大的临时棚屋区和周围的富裕社区进行了实证研究, 显示出水的不安全性和不稳定性方面的差距, 这些因素不仅让城市穷人感受到了更强烈的被排斥感, 还影响了他们生活中的公民行为、社区动员能力,以及通过水对相交集的公民权、认可和归属感的要求。在城市水环境中, 水和基础设施物质性的时空维度与具体的性别、阶级和移民身份不均匀地交织在一起, 导致居住在落后和缺乏水资源的区域的城
市公民被分化。本文认为, 从具体化的视角观察城市公民的交际性, 可以进一步丰富水资源与公民关
系的科学研究。 关键词:公民身份, 具体化, 基础设施, 交叉性, 城市, 水。
Los acad�emicos han demostrado que la ciudadan�ıa est�a ligada al suministro de agua en las megaciudades del
Sur Global, donde las crisis h�ıdricas suelen tener dimensiones mayores y donde los pobres urbanos carecen de
acceso a la oferta p�ublica de agua. Apoy�andose en la erudici�on feminista cr�ıtica, este art�ıculo reivindica la
importancia de analizar las conexiones que existen entre las interseccionalidades personalizadas de diferencias
socioespaciales (en este caso, g�enero, clase y estatus migratorio) y las materialidades (del agua y de la
infraestructura hidrol�ogica), y sus efectos relacionales sobre la ciudadan�ıa urbana. La investigaci�on emp�ırica en
los asentamientos informales m�as grandes de Dhaka, Bangladesh, lo mismo que en los vecindarios pudientes
de los alrededores, demuestra que las diferencias en inseguridad y precariedad h�ıdricas no solamente refuerzan
entre los urbanitas pobres el sentido aguzado de exclusi�on, sino que afectan sus pr�acticas de vivencia
ciudadana, movilizaciones comunitarias y los reclamos interseccionales por la reivindicaci�on de la ciudadan�ıaurbana, reconocimiento y pertenencia, en el contexto de los problemas del agua. Las dimensiones espaciales y
temporales de las materialidades del agua y de la infraestructura se interceptan de modo desigual con las
encarnaciones de g�enero, clase y estatus migratorio en el paisaje h�ıdrico de la ciudad, para crear ciudadanos
urbanos diferenciados en espacios de mezquindad y desposeimiento. El art�ıculo sostiene que una perspectiva
cotidiana personificada en las interseccionalidades de la ciudadan�ıa urbana enriquece la erudici�on sobre el
nexo agua–ciudadan�ıa. Palabras clave: agua, ciudadan�ıa, encarnado, infraestructura, interseccionalidad, urbano.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 0(0) 2020, pp. 1–18 # 2020 by American Association of GeographersInitial submission, May 2017; revised submissions, July 2018 and July 2019; final acceptance, December 2019
Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
Who has clean safe water, and who does not,reveals the workings of power around theworld. Geographers and other social scien-
tists have argued that citizenship is tied to water pro-vision in the cities of the Global South where watercrises are often extensive (Castro 2004, 2007, 2008;
Gandy 2004; Bakker 2010; Anand 2011;Ranganathan 2014; von Schnitzler 2016). Wateraccess separates subjects from citizens, in that thosewho are considered to be proper urban citizens are
provided water by the state, whereas others are not.Understanding the messy realities and complexitiesof the water–citizenship nexus involves clarifying the
inequities around water access to reveal the powerrelations and practices of citizenship in each context.To better understand the water–citizenship nexus, I
argue, it is helpful to consider how urban citizenshipis shaped by the embodied intersections of sociospa-tial differences (in this instance, gender, class,
and migrant status) and materialities (of water andwater infrastructure). In developing the argument, Idraw from ethnographic research from the largestinformal settlement or slum1 in Dhaka, the capital
of Bangladesh, as well as surrounding affluent neigh-borhoods, to demonstrate that those without ade-quate clean, safe water often invoke claims to urban
citizenship to demand public water services that theyare otherwise denied and, in the process, negotiateand enact urban citizenship rights in spaces of abjec-
tion and dispossession. I trace the embodied intersec-tionalities of these realities before and after publicwater services started to become available in this
slum to demonstrate the complexity of the uneven-ness at a variety of scales. After a brief introductionto the topic, I bring together scholarly literatures onurban citizenship, feminist theories, and water infra-
structure to expand the water–citizen nexus. I thenweave in empirical evidence to support my argumentand conclude by showcasing the importance of
applying an embodied intersectional framework tocritically analyze urban water problems.
Water distribution is almost always contested in
the megacities of the Global South, because accessto formal water service and infrastructure is deter-mined through a range of issues that are historical,political, economic, social, and legal (Bakker 2010).
Water access reflects power, voice, authority, andlegitimacy. Although secure public water access isshaped by multiple social relations in postcolonial cit-
ies, class status tends to dominate (Swyngedouw
2004; Kooy and Bakker 2008a; Ahlers et al. 2014;Furlong and Kooy 2017). With complex social classes
inhabiting the same place, different water manage-ment practices can coexist even among households inclose proximity (O’Leary 2016). In rapidly expandingmegacities such as Dhaka, there are growing numbers
of slums with ever-increasing numbers of urban resi-dents who do not have access to formal water servicesand infrastructures, because they do not have tenure
or property rights to the land on which they live.Land ownership or legal tenancy is directly tied tourban citizenship because such identities ensure being
connected to the formal governance structures of thecity, including the water infrastructure. Property statusoften becomes a mediator through which a human
right to water is manifested through access to thepublic water system: Those with recognized propertyor tenancy rights have entitlements to municipalwater, whereas illegal squatters (slum residents) do
not have formal standing to be part of the networkedwater system. Dawson (2010) argued that citizenshipis complicated by class relations even when all citi-
zens have some form of water access, but in citieswhere proximal populations do and do not havewater, such as Dhaka, water comes to symbolize social
power as well as recognition and belonging to thecity and the nation-state. Infrastructures that providesafe, clean water and the absence of such infrastruc-ture thus mark spaces of difference and abjection
(Lemanski 2019). Because no one can live withoutwater, the daily struggle to source and obtain potablewater becomes a signifier of poor urban residents’ pre-
carious status in the city. Water thus plays a criticalrole in the urban poor’s relationship to the state andthus the daily lived experiences of urban citizenship
(Rodina 2016; Rodina and Harris 2016; vonSchnitzler 2016).
There are often contradictions between policy and
practice in water provision. In recent years, giventhat the United Nations and nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) have been promoting ahuman right to water (Sultana and Loftus 2012,
2020; Mehta et al. 2014), it becomes imperative toinvestigate how such policy discourses are lived onthe ground. The urban poor navigate various strate-
gies to access water and make claims to their rightsand recognition through water (Castro 2008; Bakker2010; L�opez 2016; Rodina 2016). For instance, in a
study from South Africa, von Schnitzler (2016)argued that citizenship is performed through claims
2 Sultana
to human dignity and humanity that water enables.
In a study from India, it was found that not having
access to water rendered people abject with the daily
negotiations and struggles over water defining the
urban poor’s everyday lives and sense of place
(Anand 2012). The urban poor experience the state
through both its abjection (e.g., inattention to the
precarity of their lives) and presence (e.g., violence
through slum demolition). Suffering thus becomes a
political claim in constructing citizenship and
belonging (Das 2011). Through an analysis of ineq-
uitable water availability and provisions, I explore
how the urban poor advance claims-making to urban
citizenship, recognition, and belonging through their
claims to both public legal water as well as to clean
safe water as a human right.I respond to Ahlers et al.’s (2014) call to address
the “gap in the exploration of agency, gender, and
embodiment” (8) in urban water scholarship. I argue
that an everyday embodied perspective on the inter-
sectional gendered and classed nature of urban citi-
zenship in relation to materialities of water and
infrastructure contributes to existing scholarship on
the importance of water services to experiences of
inclusion and belonging, citizenship, and state–soci-
ety negotiations. Existing literatures have advanced
scholarly understandings of the relationship between
water and citizenship, but there is little from an
intersectional feminist perspective, yet gender–water
relations are important given how gender mediates
access, use, control, and management of water
(Cleaver and Elson 1995; O’Reilly et al. 2009). I
engage with insights from feminist scholarship to
nuance existing water–citizenship conceptualizations
to underscore the different ways in which water
access comes to inflect everyday embodied experien-
ces of urban citizenship.Intersectionality, as conceptualized by black and
postcolonial feminist scholars, involves investigating
the interlocking systems of oppression and difference
in context to explain lived and embodied experien-
ces (Mohanty 1984; Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1991;
Collins and Bilge 2016). In most societies, gender
and class are dominant social intersectional axes,
whereas in others, race, religion, caste, and other
axes of difference can play important intersectional
roles. In the context of Dhaka, gender, class, and
migrant status are the most pressing axes of social
difference and oppression.2 Thus, this article adds to
the work of scholars who have focused on related
issues (Truelove 2011, 2019; L�opez 2016; Sultana,
Mohanty, and Miraglia 2016; Thompson 2016;
Harris et al. 2018) but further reveals how the con-
structions and lived experiences of urban citizenship
in relation to water access are complicated by con-
nections between intersectional sociospatial differ-
ences (e.g., gender, class, and migrant status) and
materiality (e.g., the specificities of water’s material-
ity, spatiality, temporality, and types of water infra-
structure). An everyday embodied perspective on
intersectionalities of urban citizenship thus enriches
the scholarship on the water–citizenship nexus. I
demonstrate how demands for public water become
intersectional gendered claims to urban citizenship
and how this is constructed and mediated. Lived
experiences of water’s materiality (quality, quantity,
availability), spatiality (location, type of access),
temporality (reliability, timing), and sourcing (legal
and public or illegal source, type of infrastructure)
are imbricated in this process. Thus, access to afford-
able, reliable, and safe public water is just not mate-
rial and symbolic gain by the disenfranchised but is
also a signifier of urban citizenship and belonging
that is tenuous, contested, and constructed.
Enriching the Water–Citizenship Nexus
To advance the water–citizenship nexus, teasing
out the differences between citizenship, urban citi-
zenship, and gendered urban citizenship becomes
necessary. Citizenship, as a concept, is lived and
experienced through spaces of inclusion and exclu-
sion and in their rights and privileges (Yuval-Davis
1997, 2011). Citizenship is performed and enacted,
it is disrupted and reformulated and lived (Lister
1997; Miraftab 2006; Holston 2009; Sassen 2009;
Kallio, H€akli, and B€acklund 2015). The exclusions
of citizenship reveal sites of negotiations (Sassen
2009). Citizenship is thus a contested terrain within
and across states and subjects, where people contest
various understandings of citizenship in their daily
lives. Becoming citizens is a continual process,
fraught with difficulties and tensions, and not a fixed
end state. Local practices affect citizenship rights
and can help form new kinds of solidarities as well
as exclusions. Citizenship is thus also about claiming
and belonging, rather than a status (Ho 2009; Das
2011). Citizenship claims are often central to the
ways in which the poor of the Global South engage
in politics that affect their lives through the claims
Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship 3
they make in urban spaces (Baubock 2003; Roy 2011;
Peake 2016). The urban poor are often “citizens with-
out a city” (Appadurai 2001, 27). Because notions of
justice are foundational to citizenship, the urban poor
are able to claim their urban citizenship, more specifi-
cally, through arguments of fairness and justice and
their right to the city (Staeheli et al. 2012). They
struggle over, contest, and claim urban citizenship
through ordinary and everyday acts of belonging in
cities (Holston and Appadurai 2008; Das 2011). This
is evident in spaces of water scarcity where legal pub-
lic water access becomes a signifier of recognition as
a citizen and belonging to a city (Anand 2017;
Lemanski 2019).Feminist scholars have sharpened debates on
citizenship by pointing out the gendered nature of
citizenship, inclusion, exclusion, and belonging
(Yuval-Davis 1997; McEwan 2000, 2005;
Mukhopadhyay and Singh 2007; Lister 2012).
Citizenship, as a set of rights and responsibilities as
well as opportunities, has historically been framed as
masculine, overlooking the complex and intersec-
tional ways in which citizenship and belonging are
highly gendered and embodied (Yuval-Davis 2011).
In patriarchal societies, these historical practices are
more evident. Gendered differences in civil, politi-
cal, and social citizenship stem from differentiated
access to power, voice, representation, and legiti-
macy (Walby 1994; Lister 1997, 2012; Yuval-Davis
1997). Exclusion of women from decision making,
political power, access to resources, having a voice,
and being valued is a common way in which gen-
dered norms influence how citizenship is experienced
and lived (Lister 2012).I draw from such scholarship to bring a feminist
intersectional lens to existing debates on water and
citizenship in this article. Everyday embodied gen-
dered practices of water bring the vagaries of urban
citizenship (or lack thereof) into the homes and
lives of slum residents. My analysis is informed by
the work of feminist geographers who investigate
how gender influences the way urbanization and
urban spaces are experienced and lived in cities of
the Global South (Peake 2016; Chant and
Mcilwaine 2016; Doshi 2017). Multiple interlocking
factors affect urban poor women’s everyday lives, sur-
vival, health, well-being, and advancement. Such
insights assist me in interrogating the intersectional
ways that gender, class, and migrant status come to
complicate notions and practices of urban citizenship
through people’s relationship to the materialities of
water and water infrastructure. The extensive litera-
ture on gender–water relations (O’Reilly 2006;
Ahlers and Zwarteveen 2009; Harris 2009; O’Reilly
et al. 2009; Sultana 2009, 2011; Harris et al. 2017)
helps me address the gap in the broader water and
citizenship literature by showcasing differentiated
ways in which claims to water by the urban poor,
especially poor and disenfranchised women, are tied
to claims to citizenship and recognition from both
the state and the city’s powerful elite.To further enrich the water–citizenship nexus, I
engage the scholarship on water infrastructure that
demonstrates how technologies and infrastructures of
water impact social life and processes of urbanization
(Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Swyngedouw, Kaika,
and Castro 2002; Gandy 2004, 2008; Keil 2005;
Loftus 2006; Swyngedouw 2006, 2007; Kooy and
Bakker 2008b; von Schnitzler 2008; Bakker 2010,
2013, 2003). Urban infrastructures are power
constellations; thus, water infrastructure confers
power (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; McFarlane
and Rutherford 2008; Cornwall, Robins, and von
Lieres 2011; Larkin 2013; Ranganathan 2014;
Radonic and Kelly-Richards 2015; Anand 2017;
Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018). State–citizen rela-
tions are increasingly being mediated through tech-
nology and infrastructure that are part of water
services delivery (Bj€orkman 2015). Anand (2011)
thus proposed the concept of hydraulic citizenship,defined as
a form of belonging to the city enabled by social and
material claims made to the city’s water infrastructure.
Produced in a field that is social and physical,
hydraulic citizenship is born out of diverse articulations
between the technologies of politics (enabled by laws,
politicians, and patrons) and the politics of technology
(enabled by plumbing, pipes, and pumps). (545)
Similarly, Shelton (2017) and Lemanski proposed
the concept of infrastructural citizenship as citizenship
is “frequently mediated through the materiality of
public infrastructure” (Lemanski 2019, 8). Indeed,
the vital materialities of both water and water infra-
structure and their roles in urban citizenship claims
are teased out in my analysis (cf. de Laet and Mol
2000; Bennett 2010). The urban poor in the many
slums of rapidly expanding megacities of the Global
South often argue that formal water services and the
physical infrastructures that enable water flow confer
a semblance of recognition from the state of their
4 Sultana
rights as citizens. Claims to public water provision
are thus both about citizenship as a form of recogni-
tion as well as claims to the material benefits that
flow to citizens (Dawson 2010; Ranganathan 2014;
L�opez 2016; Lemanski 2019). Water infrastructure
can also have other impacts, though. For instance,
some scholars have argued that with the adoption of
prepaid water meters, citizens become consumers and
thus their status as rights-bearing subjects becomes
precluded (Allen, D�avila, and Hofmann 2006; Loftus
2006; von Schnitzler 2008; Furlong 2011, 2013;
Anand 2017). Ranganathan (2014) argued, however,
that when the urban poor pay for piped water it is
not simply an expression of consumeristic subjectiv-
ity but a claim for symbolic recognition, fostering
political subjectivity to negotiate for other rights,
such as to land.
As Kabeer (2006) argued, perspectives of people
themselves in what citizenship means to them can
offer insights into how they make claims and why.
Taking such an approach, a more complex under-
standing of the lived experiences and constructions
of urban citizenship becomes possible. Heeding the
multifaceted intersections of social differences and
the materialities of water and infrastructure reveals
more clearly the constructions and enactments of
urban citizenship and thereby offers an intersection-
ally embodied conceptualization of the water–citizen-
ship nexus, which I undertake in the remainder of
the article.
The Context
Empirical research that informs this article comes
from Korail slum, the largest informal settlement in
the heart of Dhaka, as well as from the affluent for-
mal neighborhoods that encircle it, namely, Banani
and Gulshan. Among Dhaka’s approximately 19 mil-
lion inhabitants, up to 40 percent live in slums
spread throughout the city (United Nations 2018).
Dhaka is the most densely populated city in the
world and one of the most rapidly growing megac-
ities (Human Development Centre 2014). Korail
slum sits on ninety acres of public land adjacent to
Gulshan Lake, right in the middle of the most
upscale residential neighborhoods of Gulshan and
Banani. The slum grew over the last few decades
first on the public land but more recently onto the
lake through illegal landfilling, as more rural
migrants moved to Dhaka in search of livelihoods.
The physical location of Korail is an important sig-
nifier: The largest concentration of poverty in the
city sits squarely in the middle of the largest concen-
tration of wealth and power. An estimated 200,000
people inhabit Korail, living densely packed in rows
of small tin sheds and straw huts. Most residents
work in low-income jobs as maids, cleaners, drivers,
day laborers, rickshaw pullers, shopkeepers, hawkers,
factory workers, trash pickers, and beggars.
The relative location of Korail plays a significant
role in both its desirability and undesirability: It is
desirable by the urban poor because they can access
their places of work more readily from this central
location, but it is undesirable among the wealthy,
who see it as an eyesore (literally and figuratively)
in the middle of bourgeois urbanity. Such tensions
are worsening as the slum has been taking over and
shrinking Gulshan Lake, a small but important water
body that replenishes the aquifer from which the
city’s water is largely derived. Korail is also undesired
by the state, which would like to recover the public
land for commercial development, and by land spec-
ulators, who seek lucrative real estate development
opportunities. Given such tensions, many residents
of Korail are vocal about their contributions to
urban society, noting the importance of their labor
to the city’s and nation’s development, their political
citizenship in voting during elections, and their for-
mal and informal roles in keeping urban society
functioning. Yet the lack of recognition by those
around them (the wealthy and powerful) as well as
the state, lack of land tenure security, and the regu-
lar eviction drives and frequent cases of arson have
created a state of constant threat where their lives
are precarious (S. Hossain 2011; Hackenbroch and
Hossain 2012). With no public water system avail-
able for decades, the failure to access a basic human
right such as water furthered their claims that they
were not seen as proper citizens by both city and
state. Korail residents had a keen awareness that
water governance was not being driven by equality
goals (despite policy discourses to such effect) but
rather by historical access, land ownership, political
connections, and economic might (S. Hossain
2012). Water access thus became a symbolic and
material marker of urban citizenship in Korail:
Surrounding wealthy neighborhoods had piped water
into homes and businesses, but the absence of such
facilities in Korail in the center of wealth became a
stark daily reminder of abjection.
Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship 5
Slums like Korail throughout large megacities of
the Global South end up being islands of nonservice
(Bakker 2003), with the urban poor experiencing
“hydrological apartheid” (Graham, Desai, and
McFarlane 2013, 123). Although proximate to pub-
lic water infrastructure, slum residents often do not
have access. This enables informal providers to
exploit the nonserviced urban poor (Bakker 2010;
Bontianti et al. 2014). Such has been the case in
Korail. The historical lack of legal public water ser-
vices in Korail had given rise to several dozen infor-
mal water providers who met the needs of the slum
residents. In general, informal and illegal water pro-
viders can be highly heterogeneous (Ahlers et al.
2014), and it is often impossible to separate out the
interdependency and entanglements between formal
and informal water providers in a locality (Schwartz
et al. 2015). The informal water economy in Korail,
or the “water mafias” (whose members prefer to be
euphemistically called water businessmen), illegally
tap into the municipal water system with rudimen-
tary rubber hoses or pipes to siphon out water that is
then sold in the slum at a steep price. Life-giving
water then becomes more readily available to the
urban poor but at an exorbitant cost. Illegal water
systems are precarious and unreliable and often pro-
vide water that is of poor quality and of insufficient
quantity. The siphoning of water by the water mafias
creates greater pressures on the municipal water sys-
tem, whereby leakages and the many illegal attach-
ments both introduce contamination into the water
network and deny revenue to the public water util-
ity, the Dhaka Water and Sewerage Authority
(DWASA). Regular drives to excavate illegal water
pipes were thus carried out by DWASA, which
worsened water insecurity in Korail (Sultana,
Mohanty, and Miraglia 2016).With lack of legal public water access prior to
2013, Korail residents deployed various methods to
procure water for survival on a daily basis, such as
paying high rates to water mafia, purchasing small
quantities of water from nearby legal suppliers (e.g.,
shops), queuing up at public water sources (e.g.,
schools or religious institutions) for extensive periods
of time, and bartering to obtain water from their
employers.3 The majority of Korail households use
some combination of these mentioned methods as
needed. They rely on various sources of water even
if they have recent public water access, because the
water supply is not always reliable or clean (as
further detailed later). Formal and informal strategies
thus continue to shape the daily lived experiences of
water scarcity. A note on different costs is important
here. The cost of 1,000 liters of water from the water
mafia is generally 100 taka (US$1.25) compared to
only 9 taka (US$0.11) from DWASA. On average,
the urban poor pay over ten times more per liter of
water than the middle and wealthier classes for their
household water. This substantial price differential
starkly reveals the ways in which water access affects
household expenditure, with those accessing illegal
water supplies spending between 20 and 25 percent
of monthly income on water alone. Those with mea-
ger incomes were thus continually exploited, because
water is a daily necessity for survival.Ethnographic field research in Korail and sur-
rounding areas in 2010, 2012, and 2017 involved
participant observation, key informant interviews,
semistructured questionnaires with Korail residents
(thirty men and thirty women), two focus group dis-
cussions (FGDs) with male and female members of
Korail community-based organizations (CBOs), an
additional FGD with women residents of Korail
only, and open-ended interviews with numerous
Korail residents and community leaders. Interviews
were also conducted with government and donor
officials and NGO staff who work inside and outside
of Korail. Open-ended interviews were also carried
out with wealthier households of Gulshan and
Banani. Additional information was obtained
through analyses of government and NGO docu-
ments and reports, newspaper articles, and policy
papers. Key informant interviews were carried out
with senior and field-level staff of DWASA and the
NGO Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), both of
whom played critical roles in how water was medi-
ated in Korail. The fieldwork spanned time before
and after public water supplies started to slowly
become available in Korail in late 2013.
Water–Citizenship Nexus in Korail
Analyzing how the urban poor act out citizenship
vis-�a-vis water elucidates the water–citizenship
nexus. Emotional distress from water insecurity can
both reduce citizen engagement in water governance
(Goldin 2010; Bulled 2017) and galvanize action
(Anand 2011; Wutich 2011). Although these con-
trasting outcomes can coexist in the same place, out-
comes are complex and context specific. In Korail,
6 Sultana
residents came to claim urban citizenship through
dialogue, collaboration, action, and collectivity over
water. This was facilitated through active engage-
ment in citizenship-building efforts of various
NGOs, but it was largely accomplished through a
close working relationship specifically with DSK,
which advocated for public water and sanitation in
urban slums (Akash and Singha 2004). Although
fraught, the process of claiming public legal water
through collective action was citizenship building
among Korail residents and instrumental for public
water supply to be brought to Korail. In general,
people organizing from below to access resources in
urban life can demonstrate rootedness and “deep
democracy” (Appadurai 2001). Having to fight for
collective water ended up engendering something
more profound in the process: a collective struggle
for urban citizenship and a common goal of accep-
tance. Engaged Korail residents thus were active in
articulating their rights and obligations, where urban
citizenship claims were performed through claims to
public water supply. “Shobar jonno pani chai” (“We
want water for all”) became a common clarion call
of Korail residents advocating for public water infra-
structure at various meetings, public discussions, and
media engagement. Enacting an embodied notion of
urban citizenship was thus tied up with legality of
water provision and water infrastructure: Korail resi-
dents did not want the continuation of the haphaz-
ard and precarious illegal water provision, because
their view was that a formal legal public water sys-
tem conferred recognition and urban citizenship and
that it was more equitable for all.Yet the abilities, opportunities, or desires to par-
ticipate in democratic water institutions varied
throughout the city of Dhaka. In the affluent and
middle-class neighborhoods with legal piped water,
the availability of continuously supplied affordable
water reduces the desires of such wealthy citizens to
engage actively with institutions that provide water.
By being connected to the urban water grid, their
understandings and experiences of themselves in
relation to the state or municipality are quite differ-
ent and water did not affect their sense of urban citi-
zenship or belonging. Wealthier urbanites can also
access emergency water supplies via water tankers
during times of disruption to the water grid, but the
urban poor cannot. Such differences and marginali-
zations are experienced bodily and emotionally, in
more-than-material ecologies of water, where water
deprivation is a daily reminder to the urban poor of
their abjection and undesired status in the city.
Water thus became a powerful signifier of their right
to the city as well as to urban citizenship. Critical
infrastructures like legal water pipes, pumps, and taps
thereby became materially symbolic and meaningful.
Failure to secure public water access in Korail galva-
nized citizenship acts, raising political awareness of
the state’s actions and inequities in water access,
which made the urban poor more politically sensi-
tized, albeit less powerful, than their wealthier coun-
terparts in the city.
Multiple meanings and connotations were gener-
ally attached to the illegal water pipes servicing the
many slums throughout Dhaka. Such systems were
emblematic of the incapacity of the state to service
all of its residents, underscoring governance failures
at multiple scales and levels, across time and space,
intensified by more migrants coming to the city to
eke out survival in a postcolonial developing coun-
try. The rudimentary illegal water pipes, generally
traveling through open drains or the contaminated
lake, had formed spaghetti-like structures that tra-
versed visibly through Korail. Actions to provide
water through informal systems might be considered
acts of insurgent citizenship by the poor (Holston
2009), but they are considered illegal by the state
and the elite in Dhaka. The presence of these pipes
was unwanted and unsightly for planners and urban
citizens, representing a symbol of failure—a failure
to manage water securely, of controlling the water
mafia, and of the expulsion of the slum. To slum res-
idents in and outside Korail, however, the material-
ity of pipes meant that the slum has the potential to
have water, to not have extreme levels of water inse-
curity and suffering, and some semblance of social
organization (in comparison to other slums).
Nonetheless, the illegal water pipes were a daily visi-
ble reminder that Korail residents were not deemed
worthy of public water provision the way wealthier
neighborhoods around them were. Thus, the illegal
pipes became symbolic of many things—illegality,
informality, abjection, poverty, and denial—simulta-
neously symbolizing resilience, creativity, cleverness,
survival. Although the coexistence of formal and
informal water provision can allow people to orga-
nize their daily household water needs (Furlong
2013; Meehan 2014), this system can also be precar-
ious and exploitative (Jones 2011; Jepson and
Vandewalle 2016). This has certainly been the case
Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship 7
in Korail, where lives and livelihoods were affected
daily with the uncertain timing and amounts of
water provided, the dirtiness of the water, the
(in)ability to afford the water, and living with the
constant threat of erasure by the state through both
pipe excavation and destruction (to eradicate illegal
water mafia) as well as through slum demotion
efforts. Regular drives by the state and municipality
to disconnect and excavate illegal pipes further com-
pounded the precarity of water access by the urban
poor. These were also constant reminders of the
denial of their urban citizenship, of signifiers of not
being valuable, of not belonging. They also
highlighted the friction between slum residents and
the state and the urban elite and became sites of
conflict as well as galvanizing mobilization.Indeed, some of the most common terms that
were used by residents of Korail to articulate their
claims to water and urban citizenship were nagorik(citizen), nagorikota or nagorik odhikar (citizenship),
and bashinda (resident) of the city. They also con-
stantly stated their odhikar (right) and dabi (claim)
for nyajjo (just or fair) water services and for greater
urban nyajjota (justice). Such language of citizenship
was used to mobilize their claims on the basis of
their contributions to the city and country but also
the fact that they voted, participated in local gover-
nance, and were both nagorik (civic citizen) and
nogorbashi (urban resident). Local people thus
defined their identities and struggles to gain legal
public water through their constructions of urban
citizenship, articulated separately from national citi-
zenship: Although everyone is a Bangladeshi citizen
(formalized more recently through mandatory
national ID cards), the claim to be a citizen of the
city is fraught and thus their urban citizenship status
is questioned by the elite and the state. Feelings of
being unwanted, disrespected, and viewed as less
than are common among slum residents, leading to
frustration, anger, and sadness. Everyone held out
hope in Korail, however, demonstrating tenacity in
the face of great odds. They hoped that the state
and wealthier urban residents, such as the antagonis-
tic and affluent adjacent neighborhoods of Gulshan
and Banani, would see them as citizens who have
legitimate claims to life-giving water and the mate-
rial infrastructures that provided it (see also von
Schnitzler 2016). Citizenship claims by Korail resi-
dents were made through repeated statements such
as “Amrao ei shohorer nagorik” (“We too are citizens
of this city”) and “Amadero panir odhikar achhe”(“We too have a right to water”).
A nuanced understanding of their lives meant
that although Korail residents acknowledged that
they were the bostibashi (slum residents), signifying a
critical understanding of their less than equitable
status in the urbanscape, they were nonetheless
nogorbashi (residents of Dhaka city) and also nagorik(citizens). They also tied dignity to citizenship, desir-
ing dignified legal access to safe public water, thus
not being treated inequitably and ignored (see also
von Schnitzler 2014). The centrality of water to
cleanliness and hygiene, to well-being and flourish-
ing, to the ability to attend school and jobs, and to
reduce sufferings was wrapped up in a clear claim to
public water supplies being tied to their place in the
urban fabric. They lived precarious lives, and this
precarity and suffering became a galvanizing political
claim for Korail residents over water. The discursive
and material aspects of citizenship through water
and infrastructure were entangled with notions of
urban citizenship and belonging in Dhaka. This
highlights the disjuncture between national and
urban citizenship and how public and formal water
access and water infrastructure mediated the lived
experience of that difference.
Korail residents had been demanding legal water
supply for decades, especially women, because this
would reduce their burdens and costs in a patriarchal
society where domestic water management is a highly
gendered responsibility. With the help of DSK, Korail
residents were successful in lobbying DWASA to
agree to a trial basis of public legal water connections
whereby DSK acted as the guarantor of payments.
This came about after nearly fifteen years of sustained
effort by several dedicated Korail community leaders
and DSK officers together in concerted negotiations
and dialogue with DWASA and local politicians.
External support, pressure, organizational skills, collec-
tivizing, and continued activism enabled the different
stakeholders to come together, despite stiff resistance
from both within (the water mafia) and outside
(wealthy neighborhoods, low-level DWASA staff
who colluded with the water mafia, and land specula-
tors). Several rationalities, though, guided the state in
finally agreeing to public water supplies in Korail: It
wanted to recoup its lost revenue that was being cap-
tured by the illegal water mafia and it also wanted to
reduce cross-contamination into the water system
from the hundreds of illegal connection points.
8 Sultana
Furthermore, there was the pressure to implement the
human right to water and sanitation that the
Bangladesh government adopted at the United
Nations in 2010. The conjunctural alignment of
global policy and local activism is thus not insignifi-
cant. The policy’s discursive framework then helped
DWASA’s Low Income Community (LIC) program
(which provides water to slums) gain broader atten-
tion and support from higher-up state officials as well
as within DWASA.Although DWASA started to install communal
water connections and lay infrastructure under the
LIC program in Korail formally in 2010, water was
not provided until late 2013. Korail residents were
deeply frustrated with this delay, despite the hard-
won and lengthy struggle to have infrastructure be
physically put into place. The resistance by neigh-
boring wealthier communities (especially Banani,
which is directly adjacent to Korail, whereas
Gulshan is across the lake) resulted in years of stall-
ing over water pumps being built and tactics such as
not giving right of way for construction, thereby pre-
venting water from flowing to the slum. The con-
cerns of the wealthier neighborhoods were that
providing water to Korail would decrease their water
supply in quantity as well as reduce supply pressure.
In an interview, one female Banani resident said,
“Amader pani kome jabe bostite pani dile” (“We will
face water scarcity if the slum is given water”). A
male Gulshan property owner expressed this con-
cern: “Aajke pani, kalke gas, bosti ar uthano jabe na”(“Today they want water, tomorrow they will want
gas—the slum will become impossible to get rid of”).
Such sentiments led to the water infrastructure in
Korail remaining incomplete for years. The counter-
argument from Korail residents, that water provision
would encourage expansion and permanency of the
slum, was that the subsurface and above-ground
water infrastructures would remain even if the poor
were evicted and the land was reappropriated by the
state in the future. The significant class-based poli-
tics and obstacles that stalled water provision led
Korail residents to file complaints with DWASA
repeatedly, as well as political lobbying and agita-
tions, but it provoked further awareness of their less-
than or abject status. A sense of injustice galvanized
Korail residents into community mobilizations to
write letters to their local politicians, give interviews
to the media, petition DWASA more vigorously,
carry out (limited) demonstrations on the streets,
mobilize patron–client networks, as well as work
with various NGOs operating in the area to stress
the importance of formalized public legal water sup-
ply. These were all enactments of citizenship.It is important to note that only by the concerted
efforts by DSK and a small group of dedicated Korail
residents did public water infrastructure and water
supply come to Korail at all. This was made possible
due to actions first undertaken within the slum to
create local water management systems: Households
were first collectivized to form into CBOs, with
elected officials, who worked with DSK to get legal
water provisions in the name of the CBO (Ahmed
and Terry 2003). The CBOs were responsible for
ensuring timely bill payment to DWASA, because
DWASA did not have a systemic or standardized
method of bill collection from slums. CBOs also
oversaw the operation and maintenance of the com-
munal standposts (shared water taps) that would be
used by members of a CBO. About fifteen to twenty
neighboring households would cluster to form one
CBO. The first legal water standpost (and related
supporting infrastructure) from DWASA that the
Korail CBO negotiated cost the community 112,000
taka (US$1,400) in total, part of which was
through a loan from DSK at a 10 percent interest
rate (Rojas-Ortuste and Mahmud 2015). This was
paid back by the CBO over twenty-four installments,
and the remainder was paid by the landlord on
whose land the water standpost was located (land-
lord is a loose term, because these are earlier occupi-
ers of the public land who built huts to rent out and
thus claim ownership of the plots of land they con-
trol). CBO members paid in cash and in kind (e.g.,
construction labor to lay underground and above-
ground water infrastructure) and the CBO had the
legal title to the water standpost. These efforts were
also enactments of citizenship claims.The success of such functioning arrangements led
DWASA to slowly start providing public water sup-
ply in Korail through the LIC program (Rojas-
Ortuste and Mahmud 2015). By 2016, Korail had
approximately 2,000 shared standposts (Sharma and
Alipalo 2017). Korail has bulk water delivery into a
reservoir with water meters that supply to the shared
standposts. Each CBO collects money for the water
supply and appoints the caretaker of the water point
from the users, who is responsible for cleaning,
maintenance, repairs, meter reading, bill collection,
and payment; the caretaker cost is included in the
Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship 9
monthly water bill of each household. CBOs meet
monthly to ensure participation of involved house-
holds in local water and sanitation management. All
CBOs were trained by DSK and DWASA on finan-
cial, operational, and maintenance issues. Because
each household’s bill is generally part of the monthly
rent, this also ensures that the total bill for each
CBO is paid somewhat regularly and timely. Such
activities are meant to enhance ownership, bill pay-
ment, maintenance, and smooth operation of each
water point. They also reduce the problem of gangs
taking control over water standposts, which used to
be a significant problem, because the standposts are
registered under a legal customer (usually the CBO’s
elected president).When water did start to flow through the public
pipes and standposts in Korail in late 2013, it was
deemed a great victory. Even though it initially ser-
viced a small percentage of Korail households, it rep-
resented the possibilities of the future. It did create
some friction within the community, however,
between those who were organized into CBOs and
connected to DSK, and thereby had public water
access, and those who still had to rely on expensive,
irregular, polluted water from the water mafias.
Despite the removal of many water mafias as formal-
ized water coverage steadily spread across Korail,
there are still twenty powerful syndicates that oper-
ate in the area, providing water to a large number of
households in the ever-expanding Korail slum and
the smaller surrounding slums (Hassan and Mollah
2017). Thus, the official figures on how many people
are provided public water are contested and data on
water coverage remain controversial and disputed. A
coexistence of infrastructures and services that are
legal and illegal, formal and informal are common
throughout cities of the Global South (Roy 2014).
Furthermore, DSK’s success in assisting with mobiliz-
ing Korail residents is a unique case of sustained
engagement by one NGO with willing community
members. As a result, DWASA’s success story in
supplying water to the slum poor would largely be
impossible without the initial facilitation and
engagement of DSK as the go-between (K. Z.
Hossain and Ahmed 2015).Ensuring continuity of this hard-won water secu-
rity requires more time and labor (physical and emo-
tional) from the urban poor, which is not something
that the rich need to do (Sultana 2011; Bulled
2017). Articulating their humanity and their rights
through citizenship claims to water is a process of
claiming justice and equity. Often treated as subjects
instead of citizens, political mobilization becomes
necessary to gain citizenship-based rights (Chatterjee
2004). However, such processes and claims to citi-
zenship are intersectionally gendered and classed
(Desai and Sanyal 2012; Beebeejaun 2017), and this
complicates the water-citizenship nexus, as I dis-
cuss next.
Intersections of Class, Gender, Water,
and Infrastructure
Although access to water has to be understood to
be spatialized and embodied in spaces of insecure
water systems, this embodiment is highly gendered,
because women and girls labor daily to fetch water
for their homes under patriarchal social norms and
the gendered division of labor in the Global South
(Cleaver and Elson 1995; Crow and Sultana 2002).
Water insecurity affects women more than men in
the slums, and their daily lives are constantly open
to disruption and distress with the vagaries of water
supplies. Gender becomes a marker of inequity and
varied suffering and thus gendered citizenship claims
are tied to lived realities vis-�a-vis water. The net-
work of illegal water pipes had marked the easing of
gendered hardship, because without such illegal or
informal water sources, women and girls suffered
even more to obtain daily water from the few pub-
licly accessible water sources further afield. As one
female respondent put it, “Panir koshto shob shomoy”(“Struggling for water has been a constant”), encap-
sulating the daily and continual ways in which water
inflects their lives vis-�a-vis time, distance, physical
and emotional labor, effort, worry, verbal confronta-
tions and friction with others, monetary costs, missed
opportunities, and overall suffering (see also Sultana
2011). Lack of water was a continual reminder of
their lack of recognition and citizenship, their liminal
status, and their embodied abjection. These degrees
of water insecurity and precarity reinforced height-
ened senses of exclusion and belonging daily.
This is also intersected by class. Wealthier women
in formalized neighborhoods do not have to donate
time or effort to claim their citizenship or right to
water in that they do not have to engage in collec-
tive endeavors for water security the way slum
women do. The state validates wealthier women in
formal neighborhoods compared to poorer women in
10 Sultana
slums through public water provision—wealthier
women are always already viewed as citizens, whereas
slum women are designated as subjects who must
labor to gain both urban citizenship status as well as
life-sustaining water. As one young mother in Korail
articulated in an interview, “Amra amader chhele-meyeder jonno bhalo pani chai karon amrao ei shohorermanush, kintu gorib bole amader kono daam nai” (“We
want clean water for our children as we too are peo-
ple of this city, but since we are poor, we aren’t val-
ued”). This denial of poor women’s roles as mothers
who provide safe, clean water on a daily basis was
an unambiguous reminder to them of their devalued
status as urban citizens in Dhaka due to their pov-
erty and patriarchal power relations. The emotional
burden of making impossible choices between using
contaminated water or paying a steep cost for
slightly better quality water posed challenges that
affected the everyday lived experiences of slum resi-
dents. Claims of belonging were displayed in the
ways people tied water availability to their urban sta-
tus as well as their abilities to fulfill gendered subjec-
tivities (good mother, wife, daughter; see also
Sultana 2009). These entanglements are pronounced
in the slums and show the ways in which citizenship is
contested and lived out in embodied ways every day.Even those in Korail with recent legal access to
public water do not have it as easy as their wealthier
neighbors in the surrounding affluent neighborhoods,
because water was generally supplied once or twice a
day, when everyone had to collect and haul from
the shared standposts to their homes all of the water
for their household’s various needs (drinking, cook-
ing, washing, sanitation, hygiene, bathing, laundry,
etc.). This demonstrates the intersectionality of class
and gender in differentiated water access at two
scales: within the slum between those with legal
water access versus those still without (mostly recent
migrants with less social capital and greater water
insecurity) and between the slum and formal city.
Water piped into homes in formal neighborhoods
reduces gendered suffering for the middle and upper
classes, but suffering continues in Korail, albeit
improved from before. Such discrepancies are not
lost on the Korail residents, as one woman ruefully
said: “Tara gario dhoy pani diye, othochho amra bechethakar jonno poriman pani pai na” (“They [the wealthy
neighborhoods] even have enough water to wash
their cars, but we don’t always get enough water for
our basic survival”). This indicates that the wealthy
can afford to waste water even as the urban poor’s
basic human right to water continued to be unful-
filled. Such consciousness was widespread throughout
the slum. When there is insufficient water supplied
to the bulk water point, Korail residents do not have
sufficient quantities of water at the shared stand-
posts. This is common during the dry season when
there is less water available city-wide. Korail CBOs
requested DWASA to install another pump so that
water can be provided regularly year-round without
the hardship faced during the dry season, but this
remains a contentious issue. Nonetheless, Korail resi-
dents see their water supply from DWASA, however
erratic or noncontinuous, and the material infra-
structures that function to provide it as signifying
acknowledgments of their urban citizenship.The intersections of gender, class, and political
and civic agency (i.e., membership in a CBO) influ-
ence lived citizenship vis-�a-vis water access.
Differential gender roles and responsibilities of patri-
archal norms disrupt the notion that all of the urban
poor suffer for water in the same ways. Despite the
increasing number of standposts in slums (both legal
and illegal), women still have to ensure the daily
collection and proper storage of water for the home
and its management thereafter. A response expressed
by one woman in Korail captured the general senti-
ment among the other women: “Amar shongshar cha-lanor kaj, tai panir chinta shobshomoy amar” (“My
responsibility is to run the household, so the worry-
ing over water is always mine”). The precarious
nature of water can result in long queues at the
shared standposts or waiting for water at night,
because water supply was never fully guaranteed.
The gendered experience of water insecurity in house-
holds is an important factor in how the water stand-
posts are used, when, among how many people, and
with what outcomes. Conflicts and collaborations
have to be mediated at shared water infrastructure.
Without reliable water flows year-round in Korail
overall, water access remains precarious, even when
relatively secure infrastructures are in place. For those
not part of a CBO or those who continue to rely on
water mafias, the gendered precarities around water
are more heightened, as noted by one woman whose
family had recently migrated to Korail: “Amra chorapani kine khai, karon ar upai nai. Shorkarer amago panidebar babosthya kora uchit taratari” (“We have to pur-
chase the stolen water [from the water mafia], because
we have no other choice. The government should
Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship 11
provide water to us soon, too”). Her awareness of the
illegality of the water mafias was linked with her
desire to be included in urban water citizenship like
others in Korail.
There are also gendered differences in how people
relate to water, even if everyone desires access. Men
and women in interviews and FGDs demonstrated
differences in their prioritizations of different aspects
of water such as quantity, quality, reliability, timing,
source, and cost. Men in general tended to focus on
costs, whereas women focused more explicitly on
equity of access, improved services, and water qual-
ity. For instance, a man who worked in a factory
expressed the following: “Ja rojkar kori ta beshir bhagghor bharate jay, pani kinar jonno beshi taka thake na”(“Most of my earnings go toward rent and not much
is left for purchasing water”); another man reliant
on illegal water sources at the time noted, “Amrapani kine khai tai shorkarer pani babosthya kore deyauchit shiggiri” (“We have to buy our water from the
water businessmen, so the government needs to solve
our water problems soon”). Several women in con-
versations and FGDs articulated the embodied emo-
tional aspects of water: “Panir jonno onek koshto kortehoy, eita protidiner jontrona” (“Our sufferings over
water are great and it is a daily struggle”); “Amraoamader polapan manush korte chai, kintu bhalo panichhara kibhabe ta hobe” (“We also want to raise our
children properly but how can we do that without
reliable clean safe water”); “Amar shorile kulay na durtheke pani ante, tai koshto hoileo olpo pani kine khaitehoy” (“I can’t haul water from far away due to poor
health, so even if it’s a burden I have to purchase
small amounts of water locally”); and “Shorkari koltheke pani tante koshto hoileo ami amar poribarer jonnopain ani” (“Even if it’s difficult for me to carry the
water from the public water standpost, I do it for my
family”). The externalization of costs (physical,
social, emotional) onto women results in men focus-
ing more on the monetary costs of water over the
more complex actualities of water precarity and
water provision. This sociocultural tax transferred to
women through gender division of labor and norms
thus does not fully address the overall costs of
accessing water. The intersectional and embodied
gendered nature of the financial, physical, and emo-
tional burdens is rarely captured in policy
discussions (Wutich and Ragsdale 2008; Sultana
2011). The embodied emotional geographies of
water are thus important in how urban citizenship is
intersectionally constructed, claimed, and
experienced.Gendered power relations also play a role in local
water management inside Korail. The CBO commit-
tees usually consist of fifteen volunteer members
from the member households, with usually thirteen
members being women (Rojas-Ortuste and Mahmud
2015). Of the twenty-one CBOs created by 2015,
seventeen were headed by women.4 These are volun-
tary positions but are important in cultivating politi-
cal and civic agency among slum residents. When a
household is unable to pay, defaults, or leaves the
slum, the CBO has to resolve the full payment of
the water bill. To avoid situations of default, the
CBO members motivate other households to keep
up with regular payments. If a household is unable
to pay at a certain time, they are covered by other
households, who are then reimbursed. For costs
related to standpost repairs, all households split the
cost. The gendered composition of the CBO com-
mittee places an extra burden on women of Korail
to do community labor in local water management
and to provide peer pressure to ensure each house-
hold’s water bill is paid. Because this reduces the
women’s burden from paying higher costs for poorer
quality water from illegal sources or having to rely
on more insecure and dirty water sources or from
distant water sources, however, the trade-off was
deemed worth it by all the female respondents. It
reduced their household costs as well as materially
reduced the gendered suffering over water. More
notable, though, the legal public water system signi-
fied many things to them: being seen as citizens by
the state, being responsible urban residents who paid
their bills and managed their water source, being
part of the broader urban fabric of valued residents
of Dhaka, and belonging to the city in some small
measure. Thus, all of the women involved in a CBO
were in full support of the expansion of legal public
water systems throughout the slum, and the recent
migrant women who did not have legal water access
were keen to benefit from this. The gendered rela-
tionship to water due to the gendered division of
labor and social norms and the relationship of water
to citizenship resulted in greater numbers of women
and girls desiring state intervention in resolving the
water crises that plagued their daily lives. For the
men who worked in the illegal water businesses (or
were water mafia bosses themselves), the availability
of municipal water infrastructure and supplies
12 Sultana
threatened their livelihoods, and thus some men
resisted legal water for many years. The threat of the
loss of livelihood, as well as not suffering the gen-
dered burden of procuring daily water, appears to
reinforce their position and thereby explain the gen-
dered disparity in desiring public water systems.What is unfortunate is that poor women, whose
time is extremely limited due to both productive and
reproductive labor demands, are the ones who are
expected to participate in local water governance
through CBOs and to enact their urban citizenship,
unlike wealthier women in formal neighborhoods
who have piped water in their homes. The necessity
to enact and live out their citizenship claims places
additional burdens on poor urban women in slums,
whereas wealthier urban women generally experience
water crises less frequently, do not need to collectiv-
ize, and do not need to do much more than pay
their bills or minimally interact with the state. As a
Banani housewife commented, “Pani na thakle amraDWASA ke phone kore complaint dei, othoba panitanker anar babostha kori” (“If we face water short-
ages, we call DWASA to lodge our complaints to fix
the problem or arrange to have water tankers deliver
water to us”). Although wealthier women also man-
age their household water, they do not have the
same relationships to water infrastructures or the
state in the way that poorer women in the slums do.
Thus, the constructions of and claims to urban citi-
zenship are intersectionally gendered and classed
through the availability of publicly provided water,
but poor women do more labor at both the house-
hold level and the community level.For the Korail residents who did not yet have
access to the public legal water system, reliance on
illegal water meant incurring higher costs and also a
sense of not being included in the urban develop-
ment plans and continual denial of their citizenship
claims. Within the same slum, there was some differ-
entiation across those who have legal water versus
those do not, often delineated along migration status
(newer arrivals often have less class status than long-
standing residents within a slum and have less secure
water access). The differences are also marked by
disparate costs incurred by these different types of
households: They have to pay both to connect and
to reconnect when the illegal pipes are cut or
removed by officials. This constant cycle of water
insecurity, exploitation, costs, and daily struggle to
obtain water (as supply is not always guaranteed)
influences their lives considerably. As a result, even
within the space of the slum, there are those with
some semblance of citizenship rights (those with
legal access to water), whereas some are still with-
out, thereby increasing their sense of abjection and
exacerbating gendered burdens and costs of these
residents. The fractured nature of citizenship demon-
strates how it can be tenuously enjoyed by some
even as many are left out within the same space,
one that is largely marked by not just their lack of
urban citizenship rights but also a lack of state
capacity and political will (Kooy and Bakker 2008b;
Ranganathan 2014; McFarlane and Desai 2015).
Thus, there is sociospatial differentiation in who has
what type of water access, from what type of infra-
structure, of what quality and quantity, at what loca-
tion, and at what costs within and across slums, as
well as between slums and formal neighborhoods.
These scalar class differences are generally mapped
onto the landscape between slums and formal neigh-
borhoods but are still fragmented internally inside
slums. Although the publicly stated goal of DWASA
has been to ensure legal water access to all slum resi-
dents, the haphazard growth of slums and the
increasing number of migrants pose continual
challenges.The sociospatial intersectional experiences of
urban citizenship continue to be entangled with the
vital materialities of water and infrastructure for
those with public water supply, too. When water is
dirty, unsafe, or smelly, the provision of water is
viewed to be a failure by DWASA and thereby the
state. Women in Korail voiced the concern that the
quality of water is as important as quantity because
purifying water incurs additional costs such as having
to use fuel to boil the water or treat it with chemi-
cals. This simultaneously involves extra costs of
finances, labor, time, and emotions. Similarly, water
infrastructure breaking down and remaining unre-
paired by DWASA, resulting in water not being sup-
plied or becoming more erratic for prolonged periods
of time, are reminders to slum residents that they
continue to remain unequal despite their recent
sense of belonging to the city and recognition
through public water access. As a woman in Korail
noted, “Amrao bill porishod kori, kintu amader paniprai nongra thake karon amra bostibashi” (“We too pay
our water bills [to DWASA], but our water is fre-
quently dirty because we live in a slum”). Thus,
whether the water is materially safe or unsafe, clean
Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship 13
or dirty, potable or unpotable, reliable or erratic, or
even available is entangled with the ways in which
water and infrastructure imbricate notions of tenuous
urban citizenship. The intersectionally embodied
gendered nature of such lived citizenship is entwined
with water’s materiality, infrastructures, and modes
of access, thereby complicating the water–citizenship
nexus in urban waterscapes.
Conclusion
This article posits that embodied intersectional-
ities of difference that produce urban citizenship are
simultaneously social, spatial, and material, and
understanding these intersections advances existing
scholarship on the water–citizenship nexus. In
Dhaka, Bangladesh, the spatial and temporal dimen-
sions of materialities of water and of infrastructure
intersect unevenly with sociospatial relations of gen-
der, class, migrant status, and political power in the
urban waterscape to create differentiated urban citi-
zens. These intersections produce different embodied
subjectivities vis-�a-vis the state, planners, and urban
elite. For residents of Korail slum, claims to water are
not just about water but also entail claims-making for
inclusive urban citizenship, recognition, and belong-
ing. Legal supplies of sufficient clean water from the
public utility foster a sense of democracy and realiza-
tion of the potential to be treated as full citizens in
the city and benefit from the human right to water.
The complex ways in which urban citizenship is
lived, enacted, and negotiated demonstrate that this
idea involves notions of justice, recognition, self-
determination, and solidarity (Kabeer 2005).Although having water is important for all slum
residents and is articulated with being recognized
and treated as urban citizens, the ways in which this
citizenship is lived are fluid. Gendered and classed
inequities in water access, control, and responsibility
highlight the ways in which this lived citizenship
differs between slum and formal city, and also within
the slums, thereby underscoring that granular and
scalar analyses are necessary to better explain lived
realities and understanding how urban citizenship
operates. The everyday experiences of the unwanted,
poor, and neglected residents of the city reveal that
urban citizenship construction and enactment
through public water access is an embodied, emotive,
gendered process. Thus, the hydraulic citizen or
infrastructural citizen has to be conceptualized as an
intersectionally embodied gendered and classed citi-
zen who is entangled with materialities and spatial-
ities of water and infrastructure in the
urban landscape.In Dhaka, a lack of cross-class alliances leads the
wealthy to fear a reduction in their water supplies as
well as the permanency of slums, thereby further
compounding intersectional sufferings of the very
poor women living in slums. Constant threats of
slum demolition, erasure, expulsion, and disposses-
sion result in exacerbating precarity and sufferings in
everyday life in Korail, with slum residents living
under constant threat of removal and disconnec-
tions and also open to new politics of exploitation
by the water mafia and their colluders as well as
land opportunists (who keep filling the lake and rent
to the urban poor). Such crises are expanding daily
as urban planning in Dhaka fails to sufficiently
address the exponential but haphazard expansion of
slums as more migrants come to the city in search of
livelihoods as economic and climate refugees dis-
placed from other parts of the country. The number
of people desiring urban citizenship thus
grows annually.
The conjunctural alignment of global policy dis-
courses of the human right to water and the existing
local struggles over water resulted in enabling public
legal water infrastructure and water supply to be
brought into the Korail slum in Dhaka. This has
symbolic and material impacts on the lived citizen-
ship and realities of the urban poor. This is not a
static outcome but has to be continually mediated.
The water–citizenship nexus can thus be understood
in more nuanced ways when embodied intersection-
alities of sociospatial differences and materialities are
accounted for in any context. The daily struggles
over water are thus sites where theorization can be
advanced, from the ground up, in the context of
cities of the Global South.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to four anonymous reviewers for
feedback that helped to improve this article and to
Annals Section Editor James McCarthy over the
multiyear gestation period of the article marred by
unforeseen setbacks after the article was first submit-
ted in 2017. Most of all, I am deeply indebted to res-
idents of Korail, Banani, and Gulshan for allowing
me access to their lives and stories. I also thank
14 Sultana
officials of DSK, DWASA, WaterAid, World Bank,
BRAC, Dhaka City Corporation, UNICEF, andDhaka University for their time and assistance. All
errors remain mine.
ORCID
Farhana Sultana http://orcid.org/0000-0003-
3050-5053
Notes
1. I use the term slum with care, acknowledging itshistorical baggage as a pejorative or negative term(Gilbert 2007) but aligning with its usage by thewell-known global movement by residents of slums,the Shack/Slum Dwellers International.
2. Dhaka is largely homogeneous in race or ethnicity(Bengalis) and religious composition (Muslim) due tothe spatioreligious partitioning of South Asia duringBritish colonial rule and postcolonial nationalism. Asmall percentage of Hindu Bengalis and ChristianBengalis do exist in the country (where religion andcaste differences can play intersectional roles) butwere not part of this study.
3. Other informal methods such as capturing rainfall inpots and buckets during the monsoon season arecommon throughout Bangladesh, but generally theseentail small amounts of water; no additionalinfrastructure for rainwater harvesting was observedin Korail.
4. Women are often found to lead community groupscreated by NGOs for domestic water projects in theGlobal South due to a mix of internationaldevelopment discourses of gender empowerment(where a woman leading a group is assumed to beempowered) and patriarchal norms of the genderdivision of labor that make women responsible fordomestic water management.
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FARHANA SULTANA is Associate Professor ofGeography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship
and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, Syracuse,NY 13244. E-mail: sultanaf@syr.edu. Her researchinterests include feminist geography, political ecol-
ogy, critical development studies, water governance,climate justice, and urban citizenship in theGlobal South.
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